Lab leak theory is gaining ground
Published by The i paper (22nd January, 2024)
Dominic Cummings is far from the ideal person to deliver warnings about dangers of misinformation, given his track record. Yet last week he wrote something that deserved attention. The former Downing Street adviser said that in spring 2020 he and Boris Johnson were assured by their most senior scientists and intelligence officials that suggestions that the pandemic might have started with a laboratory incident were “definitely false” and a “conspiracy theory”.
He added that a page of his evidence to the UK Covid Inquiry had been redacted by the Cabinet Office on national security grounds, so even the presiding judge could not see what he had written. “Whitehall wants no investigation of how and why the [prime minister] was given such monumentally false advice and encouraged to pass on this duff advice to the world,” he added.
Cummings is right – on this issue, at least. A few journalists, such as myself, have worked since the pandemic’s early days with a handful of scientists and researchers around the world to winkle out the origins of that strange new virus. Yet such is the stifling official silence that when Michael Gove told the Covid inquiry that “a significant body of judgement” believes that Covid “was man-made”, he was shut down instantly.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the former chief scientific adviser to the UK Government, fights to keep secret a diary kept during the pandemic, while some of his key emails – which I obtained through freedom of information requests – were so heavily redacted to make them worthless. Even Edinburgh University blocked my requests to obtain some potentially significant email discussions, supposedly to protect a prominent professor’s health and safety.
We do not have definitive proof on the origins, although the lab leak theory grows steadily stronger with every crumb of evidence obtained. But we have known since early in the pandemic that Beijing’s callous regime hid the 2019 eruption of a new disease in Wuhan by silencing whistle-blowers and hiding crucial data – with hideous consequences for the rest of humanity.
China’s scientists even sequenced the genome of Sars-CoV-2 – the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid-19 – before Taiwan tipped off the World Health Organisation about the outbreak. Now it seems beyond doubt that Western scientific and political leaders also sought to suppress this debate, aided by journals with fiscal ties to China, weak politicians and patsy journalists.
This disturbing attempt to dupe the public – whether to hide funding links to high-risk research taking place in Wuhan or appease a vile Communist dictatorship – appears to have involved major American and British funding bodies, together with a group of prominent scientists.
Despite expressing private concerns over “Wild West” research practices taking place in Wuhan and their fears of a possible laboratory link that have dripped into the public domain, influential experts – mentioning pressure from “higher-ups” – pushed statements scorning such ideas into prestigious scientific journals. This led the lab-leak concept to be branded “conspiracy theory”, dismissed as Trumpite nonsense and even condemned in some places as racist.
Adopting such a stance was strange given the fallibility of human beings, scores of previous laboratory mishaps and location of the initial outbreak. Wuhan is far from the nearest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses, which are found in the tropical caverns of southern China. Even Shi Zhengli, the country’s leading expert on such diseases, said she was surprised that Covid had emerged in her home city. She is based at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s most important biosecurity laboratory and Asia’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses.
Despite known safety concerns, it was carrying out cutting-edge experiments to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice – and this controversial “gain of function” research took place in low-level biosafety conditions.
Shi worked for many years with her friend Peter Daszak, a British scientist whose New York-based EcoHealth Alliance was given millions of US taxpayer dollars to hunt bat viruses that were sent to Wuhan. Intriguingly, Daszak was identified as a covert organiser of an infamous statement published in The Lancet medical journal early in the pandemic that was signed by 27 experts and condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, while praising China for “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data.
Then, last week, alarming new details emerged about a 2018 funding proposal led by Daszak to the Pentagon’s research arm for work with Wuhan to find, combine and culture coronaviruses with ability to infect human cells. This document, released through US freedom of information requests, obviously does not show that these people engineered Sars-CoV-2, not least since their bid was rejected on the basis that it might put local communities at risk.
But it raises legitimate questions and, as François Balloux, the director of the genetics institute at University College London, told The Times newspaper, this tilts the balance of debate – especially when no real evidence has emerged to back claims of zoonotic transmission, despite attempts to link various animals to the spread of a bat diseases into humans.
The proposal confirms that there were plans floating around just before the pandemic for the sort of risky work in Wuhan that might have led to Covid. As Michael Lin, an associate professor of neurobiology and bioengineering at Stanford University in California, stated: “It does soundly refute denials, by the proposers and those blindly echoing them, that [the lab leak] was a ridiculous or impossible idea.”
Science depends on sharing data and unshackled debate, while democracy relies on the freedom and openness that distinguishes it from autocracy. So if there was a concerted effort to dampen debate about the origins of the pandemic, it is simply scandalous.
This would be an abuse of power and betrayal of science on an epic scale, while endangering the planet by frustrating efforts to protect us from future pandemics. Sadly, it is not just dictatorships that seem so scared of the truth in this search for the birth of a disease.